“She’s not here,” Gazzy said tonelessly, sitting down on a broken beam. “Or if she’s here, she’s part of the ashes.” His voice broke.
“Let’s start over again, from the first building,” Dylan said, squeezing Gazzy’s shoulder. He sounded tired but determined.
“No,” said Fang. “We should take to the sky, do recon, and see if they left tracks—whoever escaped, I mean. She could be with them.”
“You think some people escaped?” Nudge’s face was drawn.
Fang nodded. “Someone always escapes.”
This had all been for nothing. My baby was still gone.
Don’t give up, Max.
My Voice was very, very faint. It had never before sounded like it was talking to me from as far away as the moon; I almost thought I’d imagined it.
Then I saw something through the dust on the floor. I pushed aside some charred beams and uncovered a metal trapdoor, maybe two feet by two feet and padlocked from the outside.
“Nudge?” I whispered.
Closing her eyes, she swept her sensitive fingers over the lock several times. I didn’t know how or why she could affect metal with her touch, but I was glad she could. Her fingers trembled with both effort and emotion, and we all clung to the hope that there might be one more place we hadn’t looked.
The lock sprang open in her hand, and we yanked the doors open.
A narrow metal staircase led down into darkness.
I went down first, my senses screaming with alertness. It took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the lack of light, but at my first quick scan, we seemed to be in a small room.
An empty room.
I felt a terrible pain in my chest as my heart constricted with grief. There was nowhere else to look. Angel was either dead or being rushed to another secret facility, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to withstand this torture until we could find her again.
The tears I had been holding back during our search suddenly started streaming down my face. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to fly out of there and never come back. Let the world take care of itself from now on. I was done.
As I turned to rush out, my eyes fell on a small back room, behind the stairs we had just come down. I reached the doorway in two strides.
A feathery, dirty heap was strapped to a table in one cold corner.
“Angel?” I whispered, not letting myself believe it could be her. We knew there were other winged kids out there. It would be too good to be true….
I took a few more steps toward the figure, and then collapsed to the floor beside it. I knew that face, that hair, no matter how wrecked they had become.
Trust me, it’s impossible to describe the rush that happens when your whole soul shifts, in an instant, from despair and loss to realizing that maybe it was all just a horrible lie, a nightmare—that hope is truly alive.
“Angel!” I cried, sobbing and stroking matted curls away from her grimy face, while Fang immediately started dismantling the clamps. “Angel! We’re right here. We came to get you. Angel—wake up!”
I gently cradled her head, which lolled back. Was it really her? Or just… her body?
I got no response. As soon as Fang was finished with the clamps I gathered her up, and it felt like I was holding Styrofoam. There was hardly anything there, as if she hadn’t eaten since Paris. Numerous puncture wounds dotted both arms. How many times could my baby be torn from me and survive it?
The massive tsunami wave of joy I’d felt moments earlier was already rushing back out to sea.
“Angel, please,” I begged, cuddling her close. “Please be okay. We’re all here now. Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, Dylan… we’re all right here. You’re safe. We’re all together. Please, sweetie, please wake up.” My words were coming in gasps.
Then—had I imagined it? Had her too-thin, too-light body shifted?
She made a tiny sound. Her eyelids fluttered.
“She’s alive!” Gazzy’s voice was hushed but thrilled.